the illustrated Saleema

The illustrated Saleema has a better fashion sense than I do, right down to coordinated jewelry!

I think this lovely little drawing was based on a photograph in which I'm wearing red shoes and a blue dress, but now I wish I had a green polka-dotted dress like this in real life.

by a. minzhulina

Thanks to Anna for the picture!!

this post is about shoes

What a busy week it has been, but a lovely sort of busy, what with seeing friends and making plans and singing and knitting and crossing so many things off of the to-do list (though it still seems to keep getting longer).  Writing acknowledgements (yes, I forgot at least one person’s name…eeep), proofing jacket copy, almost needing to send out a search party for the page proofs (the post office promised Monday, and they arrived Wednesday…not sure what I paid all that extra money for), making efforts to speed along payment for freelance work in 2012 (several thousand dollars worth…sigh), and moving through lots of beginning-of-term stuff at the day job. 

I had a little bit of time for fun, too.  My mother-in-law continued her wardrobe purging spree over the holidays, and I returned home with even more wonderful pairs of shoes to add to those I’d been given earlier.  As promised, I took pictures of this amazing vintage windfall.  (A few pairs not included…a comfy Italian pair of black loafers with criss-cross laces I’ve left at work, and a pair of brown, lace-up suede booties that were by the front door when I found the five minutes necesary to do this.)

 

I can tell the gold ones will be great for a night out, the cute pink ones with the bow are Kate Spade, the black patent ones have already been essential (I’m wearing them even as I write this).  The white peep-toe ones with the green accent are probably my favourites, but they will have to wait until spring as I doubt I own a pair of tights without holes in the toe!  The green ones I wasn’t excited about until I tried them on and they turned out to be fabulous. And the amazing black lace-ups in the middle are Yves St-Laurent!  I’m too lucky for words.   And I hope this will make it easier for me to let go of some of my existing pairs of shoes... 

Composedly gleeful about vintage shoes.

cool down and emptiness

The weather has finally cooled down here, which means a respite from tiny summer dresses back into comfy long jeans and t-shirts. It's always exciting, initially, when it's warm enough for those flirty sundresses, but I feel more like myself, somehow, when I can wear a minimum, modest amount of clothing of the sort in which I could easily undertake any of a range of possible, improbable tasks: dish washing! ditch digging! apartment fleeing! spontaneous dance partying! And truth be told, I can't remember the last time I did any writing in a rose-patterned tea dress. Jeans it is! All the cool things get done in jeans.

The heat wave also stalled me out on what I have been wishfully referring to as my "fast novel project." The concept? Write a fast novel. Sounds good, right? Well, easier said than done. (Duh, you say. To which I say, touché.) Working from a set of deadlines dubbed the "nerd grid," I've been trying to quickly turn out some pages of a novel I've had in mind, while remaining accountable to my two friends who initiated the exchange with each other in order to stay motivated through the editing progress of their own manuscripts. Deadlines are a gift, and I was (still am!) really excited about their stimulating possibilities. But absolutely no writing could get done in my apartment at 42 degrees Celsius with my one sad, whirring fan. Maybe this is not unrelated to my point about jeans above. Sitting around in fever heat in the politest alternative to underwear one can scrounge up does not inspire literary genius, or even say, a couple of average sentences, which is what I more reasonably strive for, in general. I did manage to do a bit of editing on my existing novel-in-progress, but that's it. But the problem about arbitrary, self-imposed deadlines is that once you breeze by one, it's very hard to re-conjure your existential faith in the rest of them. But we'll see.

The other problem with writing right now is that -- for prose, anyway, in my own limited experience -- one really has to be calm to write. And I'm not calm. I think a state of not calm is a great one for dreaming things up, for getting excited about a million different projects, for thinking up beginnings and endings and complications, but it is not ideal for that discipline of sitting back down (and down and down and down again) at the computer. That requires its own special kind of...I almost want to say emptiness, in which you can find enough stillness and space to let the story come on its own and fill you up.